‘It Sat in the Closet, Haunting Me’: The Lie That Led to Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy Picking up His First Guitar (Video)

“My first acoustic guitar,” begins Jeff Tweedy, the singer/songwriter/guitarist and creative powerhouse behind Wilco, “was… I don’t think it had a name brand. Very, very difficult instrument to play; it really discouraged me when I was young, so it sat in the closet for a long time—from six years old til about 11 or 12 years old it sat in the closet haunting me.”

In a video interview with Reverb, Tweedy reveals the impetus behind finally learning to play: a tragic bike accident that laid him up for months—and a lie that the preteen Tweedy widely spread around his schoolmates that he could already play guitar. “I was in bed most of the summer, and I realized that I’d told everybody that I know that I know how to play the guitar. And [the injury] was my opportunity to actually learn how to play the guitar.”

Tweedy goes on to explain how he graduated from the cumbersome acoustic to a… cumbersome electric. “It was a Peavey T-60 that was like, child abuse to put it on your body […] especially someone that was recovering from a bike injury. I never even understood how they made a guitar that heavy,” says Tweedy about his first electric guitar. “I was disappointed, when it showed up, to be honest. It wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted a Telecaster.” 

But the future Wilco frontman’s fortunes were soon to change for the better when his brother got a windfall from a jobsite accident. Flush with his workman’s comp, the elder Tweedy bought his little brother the guitar he had pointed out in the music shop—a black and white Fender Telecaster that, Tweedy concedes, “ended up being almost as heavy as the Peavey T-60.”

Tweedy goes on to explain how trading in his early instruments for money to go on tour with his band Uncle Tupelo led to finding vintage gear while out on the road. “You’d drive out to some farmer’s house and he would have a Fender Twin, for some reason, and that’s where you got it.” It was around this time that Tweedy got the vintage gear bug—bad. His mother even came down with a case of G.A.S. on his behalf: “she got me a black ‘50s (Gretsch) DuoJet for $35 at an auction, and an ES-350 with three pickups […] a really rare guitar, for like, $125.” Tweedy’s eyes light up as he confides to the camera, “those both belong to (ZZ Top’s) Billy Gibbons now.”

That covers just the first five minutes of the 40-minute video interview, the rest of which comprises equally titillating Tweedy-spun yarns of vintage gear lore from the Wilco frontman’s collection. Watch the video below to see and learn more about his unbelievable archive of vintage guitars and amps, courtesy of Reverb.com.